Comments from “Plugged-In” Readers

If you just read the comments on this blog, you’d come away believing that The City has been doing nothing but wasting money and time thwarting the creation of market-rate housing in favor of below market rate housing, but the actual result is just the opposite.
From the Bay Guardian Online tuesday, San Francisco’s loss:

San Francisco is increasingly losing its working and creative classes to the East Bay and other jurisdictions — and with them, much of the city’s diversity — largely because of policy decisions that favor expensive, market-rate housing over the city’s own affordable housing goals.

…Census data tells a big part of the story. In 2000, the median owner-occupied home in San Francisco cost $369,400, and by 2010 it had more than doubled to $785,200. Census figures also show median rents have gone from $928 in 2000 up to $1,385 in 2010 — and even a cursory glance at apartment listings show that rents have been steadily rising since then.

I certainly don’t think that median household income in SF doubled between 2000 and 2010, even given the influx of higher-income, highly mobile top one percenters and the concomitant displacement of working class households. The story goes on to discuss the findings of a new study by the Budget and Legislative Analyst, commissioned last July by Sup. David Campos, which reached similar conclusions regarding new housing:

A big part of the problem is that San Francisco is building plenty of market-rate (read: really expensive) housing, but not nearly enough affordable housing. The report Campos commissioned looked at how well the city did at meeting various housing construction goals it set for itself from 1999 to 2006 in its state-mandated Housing Element—the plan called for 7,363 market-rate units, or 36 percent of the total housing construction, with the balance being housing for those with moderate, low, or very low incomes. Developers built 11,293 market rate units during that time, 154 percent of what was needed and 65 percent of the total housing construction. There were only 725 units built for those with moderate incomes (just 13 percent the goal) and just over half the number of low-income units needed and 83 percent of the very low-income goal met.

I’ve been thinking for a while, with nothing really to support it, that developers like to build all these luxury, luxe and überluxury units, and that if certain city policies that people like to complain about as being sins against the almighty free market were to disappear tomorrow, it wouldn’t necessarily increase the number of affordable units because developers and owners would just do more to target the top of the income distribution.

^Depends on which policies that you’re talking about. If we were somehow able to eliminate the city-wide height limit, we’d likely see some not so luxe housing being built.
As it is now, so few parcels can even accommodate new housing that any that can have their land prices bid through the roof to the point that only luxury units pencil out. To get this right, we’d really need to do it ALL at once, to eliminate the value capture that folks do now by sitting on land and hoping for a jackpot heigh increase/zoning variance/new neighborhood plan/etc.
Likelihood of this happening? Zero.